]]>Last month I had the opportunity to speak at FITC’s “Spotlight UX/UI” here in Toronto. This one day event featured seven speakers and I was honoured to kick off the morning with my talk entitled “Design That’s Easy on the Brain“.

They recently posted the recording of the talk so I’m embedding it below. Unfortunately I think they had a technical issue so the last few minutes got cut off – The full slide deck is on Slideshare so you can see what you missed. (I think it’s around slide 75 in the deck where the video ends)

]]>One of my favorite podcasts over the past little while has been 99% Invisible. Hosted by Roman Mars (@romanmars), 99% is a podcast that looks at design & architecture but focuses on the ‘hidden’ stories behind everyday things.

Every episode delivers some interesting insight or nugget of wisdom and from time to time heads down some really interesting rabbit holes.

They’re also relatively short episodes, 15-20 minutes, so they make for a great mental snack size but also publish episodes frequently enough that you can stack a few up for longer listening sessions (I usually wait for 3 or 4 new episodes then listen to them on my commute).

Some recent favorite episodes:

Octothorpe: A look at the history of the pound sign (or now, more popularly known as the ‘hashtag’)

Thomassons: Bet you didn’t know there was a name for architectural ‘leftovers’

]]>http://ryancoleman.ca/2015/01/listen-to-99-invisible.html/feed/0When Leading, Words Matter. Use More of Them. (The right ones)http://ryancoleman.ca/2015/01/words-matter.html/
http://ryancoleman.ca/2015/01/words-matter.html/#respondFri, 23 Jan 2015 03:23:06 +0000http://ryancoleman.ca/?p=1383Continue reading When Leading, Words Matter. Use More of Them. (The right ones)

]]>Removed from the true Start-up life for a few years now, and completely removed since last fall, I’ve been enjoying listening the ‘Startup‘ Podcast from Gimlet Media over the past few months.

It’s like one of those movies where the plot is just predictable enough you want to scream “Don’t go in the basement!” at the screen while delivering enough surprises to keep you on the hook.

Their latest episode focused on “Burnout” and specifically, how their entire team had hit that stage and were ‘done’, “Burn the place to the ground” done in their words. You can listen to the episode here:

It’s a great episode but what I want to focus on though, isn’t the burnout aspect, but rather a revelation their founder Alex Blumberg has partway through the episode when he realizes what he thought he ‘said’ and what he actually said were worlds apart, and caused his team huge amounts of stress to his team.

Employees will fill a vacuum

Several years ago I participated in a workshop run by a group called Eagle’s Flight – my biggest takeaway from the particular program they were taking our team through was that when there were unanswered questions it left a vacuum – and left too long, employees would fill them on their own. And let’s be honest, it probably won’t be the rose coloured, everything is awesome, kind of filling.

In the Startup episode above, Alex admitted he had a few occasions where his own lack of clarity in his answers sent his staff’s minds down some troubling rabbit holes. They filled the vacuum for him.

I’ve experienced this first hand on more than a few occasions – the worst was when we had to lay someone off at one of my first companies. Circumstances dictated we needed to do it, but when you knew the details it wasn’t the doomsday prophecy our staff ultimately perceived it as. Laying off one person to get through a tough period ending up costing us a few developers who were highly employable and got spooked. These were the guys I would have probably laid myself off before letting them go, they had nothing to worry about. A better explanation & filling their ‘vacuums’ for them could have saved a lot of grief.

This isn’t unique to startups though – this will happen from the smallest company (or relationship) right up to the largest enterprises. It’s something I’ve tried to be cognizant of as we build programs in the bank where I work today as much as I was in a start-up shop of 6 people.

Filling the Vacuum Yourself

When you’ve got time to think…

If it’s a situation where you’ve got the time to prepare, take advantage of that opportunity. Whether alone, or with some trusted advisers/colleagues, stop and ask “What are all the questions that people could have about what I’m going to say?” – throw them on post-its and then ask yourself “Which of these can I answer right now?”

When I do exercises like this at work I have people sort the questions into three categories:

Green – We can answer completely this right now.

Yellow – We’ve got the answer but need someone or some piece of information in order to answer properly.

Red – @#!$, I don’t even know where to begin.

Obviously the first thing to tackle is those Reds & Yellows. Then, when you’ve got those answers, revise what you have to say to ensure you satisfy those questions (at least to the extent that is practical). When you can take the time to tailor your response to cover the important bases the end result will be so much better.

When you’re on the spot…

On the spot is that much harder. Take a breath, do the spot check with yourself (“What questions will they have?”) frame what you have to say as best you can. Then ask the all important question(s) – there’s a couple of obvious one’s:

Does that make sense?

What are your concerns?

But one of the most interesting approaches I’ve encountered is to ask someone to tell you what they just heard – an approach known as “Active Listening“. As wikipedia’s entry puts it:

Active listening is a communication technique used in counselling, training and conflict resolution, which requires the listener to feed back what they hear to the speaker, by way of re-stating or paraphrasing what they have heard in their own words, to confirm what they have heard and moreover, to confirm the understanding of both parties

I had the ‘opportunity’ to work on a slightly dysfunctional team where we brought in a coach to try and help resolve our challenges – it wasn’t confrontational but it was clear there were communication issues.

Active listening was one of the techniques the coach applied to tremendous effect. We’d have a conversation between the four of us on the team and then he ask someone to tell everyone what they’d just ‘heard’ – generally most of us were in alignment but there was one teammate whose interpretation seemed to come consistently out of left field. It was an excellent reality check and was something we worked through as a group to improve our level of conversation.

In tough circumstances, consider trying this approach after you’ve delivered news that you’re unsure of what the reaction will be.

In Conclusion

As an entrepreneur, or leader in an enterprise, you need to choose your words wisely on every occasion. Use more words (the right ones) thank you’d probably like, and don’t leave your message to chance.

When in doubt, ask your team what their questions are – fill those vacuums before they have a chance to.

What’s your take? Have you seen vacuums at work in your workplace? How did you help fill them? Let me know in the comments below.

]]>Last weekend I was invited to come and facilitate at the Visual Thinking and Literacy Conference in Birmingham, MI. This is the second year the conference has run – it’s a neat little event that draws a mix of people from the education & business worlds (as well as a hand full of students too).

In addition to my session (on brainstorming tools & techniques) I was also invited to participate in a live taping of The Forge, a monthly video show/podcast put together by Matt Pierce at Techsmith. The show was taped in two segments – the first a panel discussion/debate on paper vs. digital with my friends and visual thinking masters Jamie Nast, Karl Gude and Brandy Agerbeck. The second part was a one-on-one interview with me that ranged form “What do you do?” to my favorite tools, techniques and my thoughts on the paper vs. digital debate.

I’ve embedded the show below – the whole thing is worth watching. If you want to jump to my interview it starts around 16:05 in.

]]>A few weeks ago a fun little app launched called “Flixel” – this little app gives you the ability to capture a short sequence of images and then control what is animated on screen. The app is free, fun and I highly recommend you try it out.

The tool itself is really straight forward to use and start creating with but there’s a few things you can do to help make the best possible flixels, so I thought I’d throw a quick post together and share what I’ve learned in playing with the app for a little while now. Feel free to share your tips in the comments too!

1. Choose the Right Setting / Scene

I find there’s two types of settings/images that work really well as flixels:

a. Isolated Motion – The real magic of Flixels is when there’s a dynamic scene where the bulk of the image is static but a single element stands out from the rest (ie a beach scene where all the people are still but the waves are always lapping at the sand – a race track where the cars are static but the crowd is animated clapping or a busy intersection but only the traffic lights move, etc.)

b. Endless Loops – The other, more straight forward and accessible kind are those shots that simply capture a scene that can be looped endlessly. It doesn’t matter so much that the movement is isolated and contrasted with static elements in the image, just that the animation itself is visually interesting.

2. Make sure you’re steady!

Motion of the whole frame basically ruins any hope of getting a decent looking Flixel and iPhones are almost impossible to hold steady. (feature request: stabilization!)

I try to brace my phone against a stable object when I’m shooting if at all possible (wall, post, newspaper box, the floor, etc.) to keep the framing itself as stable as possible.

That said there are a couple of cheats/tricks you can use:

a. Simple backgrounds

Avoid having other objects/patterns behind the thing you want to animate. the fewer ‘landmarks’ behind the animation the more likely any subtle jitters will be. For example, no one will notice if part of a plain white wall shifts behind the subject but if it’s a tiled wall and the lines get disjointed and broken during the loop it’ll be very obvious. And whatever you do – don’t have something else moving in the background of the item you want to animate. If you’re not careful, you could get that perfect seamless loop captured but then there’s some other thing moving in the background that ruins.

b. Hide the motion

The other trick is to frame your image so there’s elements that can serve as a buffer to “absorb the motion”. For example, in the Flixel at right I used the black frame of the window as a solid object to absorb the motion. If nothing else in the area is moving you could also expand the animated area out to something that has fewer features/landmarks or makes a natural barrier to hid the motion at. (cloudless blue skies are great for this)

3. Capture and tweak your image to create SEAMLESS looping

This is by far the most challenging part of capturing great Flixels but for them to truly work they need to be seamless. The app itself gives you a few easy tools to help teak your capture and smooth things out but unless you take the loop into consideration before you shoot, it won’t fix everything.

a. Passing through the frame

If something you intend to keep animated is moving across or up or down the frame make sure it enters and leaves the frame within the short capture time. If it doesn’t, your options for creating a seamless loop become very limited (see b. below) as they/it will change size or position significantly and cause a noticeable jump when then loop resets. Generally the best results are loops where the object stays in one spot and the object moving returns back to the same spot (or appears to move back to the same spot) at the end of the cycle.

b. Using the Forward-Reverse Loop

Your only way out of the challenge above is the forward-reverse loop (access through the “looping” tab). Basically this feature changes the loop from the default, which goes from Point A (Start) to Point B (End) and then jumps back to Point A again into a loop that instead reverses itself when it hits Point B and runs the animation backwards to return to Point A.

This can be used to great effect, but be aware of how the animation will look in reverse. In the swing example it’s a motion that is naturally perfect for this style of loop but if there’s a person with long hair on that swing it’ll look pretty strange when it’s blowing backwards away from them when the animation runs backwards to return them to Point A – you can see a similar issue in my Flixel at right but I felt at the end of the day, it didn’t ruin the shot.

c. Set Your Start & End Points Deliberately

This is the mistake I see most often and usually in Flixels that, for want of another minute of tweaking where the animation starts & ends, would have been perfect. It’s dead easy in Flixel to tweak these points through the “Start/End” tab and they make all the difference in how an animation loops.

The best example for these is the subway/endless train shots. Use the start/end frames to ensure the gap between the cars lines up between Point A and Point B. I can’t count how many great shots I’ve seen of an endless subway or train going by, only to have the doors or gap between the cars jump half a car length when the loop resets. You don’t have to use all the frames, if something is moving fast enough you may only need 3 or 4! I try to make frame B be just slightly behind frame A so there isn’t a slight pause/stop in the animation as it rolls through.

Also be aware with the reversing loop style – objects have natural motions, use the start & end frames to ensure that you make the transition from forward to reverse (and reverse to forward) as natural as possible. one single frame can make a huge difference. Flick back and forth between “Starting Frame” and “Ending Frame” to get a sense of how they line up/compare.

In Summary

So there you have it remember to choose the right setting, keep your camera steady and capture & tweak your image to create a seamless loop – you’ll be on your way to creating a well-loved (& probably featured) Flixel in no time!

(I’m ryancoleman on the Flixel service by the way – look me up & let me know if you get some great results, I’d love to see them!)

]]>As part of my theme for this year (“Create”) I’ve been trying to figure out how best to organize my different streams as I push content out into the web. One thing I’ve started to become more sensitive to is how I’ve got several different interests, passions, hobbies that don’t always cross over to one another which can make some of my streams feel like a lot more noise than signal.

So, with that in mind I’ve started to make some changes and tweaks to try and focus the different streams of content so those who choose to consume content I produce (thanks, by the way) can get the type of content they’re interested in, and hopefully none (or at least as little as possible) of the stuff they don’t.

New Portfolio Site

The biggest change so far is that I’ve started to migrate all work/portfolio related content into a new site at http://work.ryancoleman.ca – since I’m working full-time the showcase worthy freelance work & speaking engagements are a little more spread out, causing them to easily get lost in the sea of other posts and content on this site. I’m also trying to keep my actual “blog” a lot lighter in terms of moving parts and that ran counter to having slicker, portfolio style posts.

– if RSS is your preferred method the Photoblog is your best bet
– @ryansphotos is the same content as the photoblog, just via twitter (my @ryancoleman account also includes these posts)
– My Tumblr Photoblog integrates the primary photoblog content & my Instagram pics

Humour, Oddstuff, General Interest [Tumblr]I’ve got an odd sense of humour – I try to keep that side of me confined to my primary Tumblr blog.

So there you have it, if you got this far thanks for reading – hopefully this helps you narrow the stream of content coming from me if the fire hose is just too much.

]]>I first got turned on to paper yesterday when John McArdle posted about it on the Teehan & Lax blog – I downloaded it right away, sprung for the brush pack shortly after and have been using it almost constantly (well, at least @ every opportunity) for the past two days. In short, “Paper” is a sketching app – you can create notebooks, add pages to them and then sketch away to your heart’s content. It comes with one brush free (and it’s a darn good brush) but no doubt you’ll want to pick-up the add on brushes ($1.99 ea or $7.99 for the whole set).
Example of Brushes & Colours available in Paper

Like John, I’m a long time Sketchbook Pro fan and had been using it for sometime. While it was great on my desktop I never quite got in the groove with it when I started trying their Sketchbook Express on the iPad. With Paper though, I immediately connected with it and just loved the quality of the default brush. Drawing features are kept to a bare minimum (brush selection, fixed palette, draw & erase & undo – aka ‘rewind’.) & changing/adding pages is simple and straight forward.

Nice Touches

A couple of things I really like:

Multiple ‘Sketchbooks’
Paper lets you create multiple “Books” in the app, so I can section off my personal stuff form my work stuff really easily – or if I’m working on a specific project I can give it its own book etc.

Rewind
Their interpretation of “undo” is great. Rather than simply undoing and removing the entire last action you made you can simple ‘rewind’ by placing two fingers on the screen & then moving them counter clock-wise. And it backs up your actions, just as rewind implies. Go too far? Just rotate your fingers clockwise. I found it a little finicky at first but after a bit of use it’s become pretty natural.

One Feature Request/Wish

While I appreciate the minimalism there’s one feature I’d love to see added and that’s very, very basic layers. I don’t eed full blown layers like Photoshop or Sketchbook but even just having two layers would be great. I’ve encountered a few times where it’d be great to be able to sketch something out on one layer, then ink & colour over it on a second and finally remove or hide the sketch layer when finished. I know it breaks the paper metaphor, but still…

Highly recommend it – Paper is available in the Apple App Store for iPads.

]]>One really cool benefit of working at BMO is our ‘Institute for Learning’ the home for our corporate training and major events in the North end of the city. Iwas invited to come up there yesterday and give my “Designing for Visual Efficiency Talk” to the staff there as well as with staff at our locations in Chicago and Milwaukee all in all there were about 40 in the room and an additional 100 or so online.

As we were using a special Virtual CLassroom app, and I had to make my 90minute presentation fit into 45 minutes, I had to do some redesign to my deck so I made a clean start and rebuilt it almost from scratch. (I was never super thrilled with how the first deck turned out either) – Working with this content has been an interesting experience as I’ve now packaged it as a 90 minute talk, a 45 minute talk and a 5 minute Ignite – it’s actually been really good practice for developing story and learning where/what to cut.

I’ve also included suggested reading materials and will add any other information to the entry on my new work portfolio site where you find my latest Designing for Visual Efficiency post.
Following the presentation I had about 20 minutes to take questions from the audience – they had some great questions and everyone seemed really engaged. I’ve yet to get the formal feedback but anecdotally it seemed like it went really well.

The 2012 Visual Thinking Conference is for anyone focused on visual approaches to thinking and communication. So whether you are a business leader giving presentations, a marketing manager designing websites and materials, or a grade school teacher looking for new ways to reach students, no other event offers you more of today’s solutions… and tomorrow’s vision.

While I’m still working out the final details of my session the basic gist will be around practically demonstrating some core visual facilitation activities (or ‘games’ for the gamestorming crowd ;) ) and showing how they can serve as building blocks in a workshop or meeting.

If you’re itching to get out to another Visual Thinking oriented event, this day long conference is an absolute steal @ $100/person (great discounts for K-12 teachers & students) so be sure to check it out & you can register here.